


Strangely Familiar (Or, Dan is from Mars, and so is Vanessa)

by inthisdive



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: Books, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-29 23:23:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12095703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inthisdive/pseuds/inthisdive
Summary: Dan and Vanessa did not expect each other. They didn’t really expect anything. Bookverse, post-series. This was written in 2008, originally published on LJ.





	Strangely Familiar (Or, Dan is from Mars, and so is Vanessa)

Vanessa Abrams had only ever felt like a typical girl since meeting Dan Humphrey. She kind of hated him for that.

* 

“Dan,” she pouted one Friday evening, as they sat on Dan's bedroom floor, watching _The Seventh Seal_ together for the ninth time, “You didn't notice my shirt.” 

“What about your shirt,” he asked absently, lighting a cigarette. Vanessa noticed that the cuffs of his grey sweatshirt were frayed. As usual, his hands were shaking. 

“Just look.” Annoyed, Vanessa looked down in the shirt in question itself, a royal purple tank she'd borrowed from her sister, Ruby. It was a simple top with classic lines, plain cotton, but – it was royal purple. Vanessa normally wouldn't be caught dead wearing any other colour than black, but here she was in purple. For Dan to notice, and maybe even ogle a little.

Dan pushed his shaggy hair out of his eyes and, obligingly, looked. “I like the way your shoulders look in that,” he finally said, and Vanessa noticed that dreamy, tortured-poet look. It meant that somewhere in his mind, he was writing a poem about her and her shoulders. She'd be flattered if she didn't know Dan's writing inside and out – if she didn't already know the poem would be an elaborate metaphor for death. 

“Forget it,” she huffed, and pulled her thin black jacket on. She caught Dan's confused look but decided to ignore it, focusing her attention back on the screen. 

_Men_. 

* 

Dan had never felt more like a poet than when he looked into Vanessa's eyes. He didn't even hate how clichéd it was.

* 

When Vanessa had started dating Aaron Rose (and sleeping with Dan on the side), Dan had felt a rush of Romanticism; he felt like a real artist with a real sexual, emotional awakening. He felt caught in a frenzy, he felt and thought _Vanessa_ all the time. 

After having sex with Vanessa on the roof of her building for the third time, Dan's not-entirely-steady hands were lighting a cigarette, and Vanessa's head was curling up against Dan's skinny chest. Her cheeks were flushed, Dan noticed, right up behind her ears. 

“Vanessa,” he murmured quietly, and she turned her head to look up at him. There were those eyes again, those eyes Dan had seen in his dreams the night before.

“Windows to the soul,” he murmured, softly. “Open. Open them and see me.” 

It was the beginning of something. The first few lines of a new poem. The first trembling steps at a second – third - fourth – whatever chance for he and Vanessa. Something big. Something meaningful. Dan’s lips trembled with the extremity of it all.

It was a beautiful moment until Vanessa rolled her eyes. 

Dan felt hurt; more exposed than his naked skin meeting the crisp evening air. He fell silent and turned his head away. The smoke billowed over them, and he didn’t say a word another word until they were off the roof. 

_Love_ , he thought, annoyed.

*

Dan hadn’t expected to fall back in with Vanessa. When he did, he fell hard, and he’d forgotten that hard falls tend to leave bruises.

* 

When Dan got in his car and drove away from Vanessa, he felt something break. When he got out on the open road, he tried to summon the spirit of Kerouac, of all the other great and lesser-known Beats he’d grown up around. The problem was that those poems lost all their mystery when heard, as Dan always heard them, in his father’s voice. 

And all the mystery that took up his mind was the curve of Vanessa’s shoulders, the sharp-turned-gentle shape of her head, and the inexplicably smoky taste of her skin. 

He sent her a text – _you are my sky_ – and his phone didn’t once beep in response. 

Dan didn’t cry then. 

He cried when he swerved to avoid hitting a stray cat, black and shorn – just like Vanessa.

*

Vanessa had expected everything and nothing about Dan. That was part of why she liked it, and him; both were absolutely contradictory.

*

Vanessa didn’t cry when Dan left. 

She cried when she picked up the phone to tell Blair about the cutely annoying poem-text Dan had sent her and remembered that she wouldn’t answer because _she_ was gone, too. 

The tears were cold and fell faltering; Vanessa felt stupid about them. She wiped them away with the sleeve of her sister’s shirt and remembered that she needed to give it back to Ruby someday. 

Sighing, and feeling utterly still in the greater movement of things, Vanessa grabbed her camera and set out to capture a tiny piece of history. 

*

Vanessa had never felt more like a stranger to herself; Dan had never felt so strange.

It was good.

*


End file.
